Nestled in the heart of Appalachia.

The University of Virginia's College at Wise is where students experience unique regional culture and the great outdoors.

UVA Wise empowering students to learn and lead in their communities and the world.

[uplifting music] [Joshua Deel] " Stand at Cumberland Gap "and watch the procession of civilization, "marching single file-- "the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, "the Indian, the fur-trader and hunter, "the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer-- and the frontier has passed by."

[♪♪♪] "Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century later "and see the same procession with wider intervals between.

"The unequal rate of advance compels us to distinguish "the frontier into the trader's frontier, "the rancher's frontier, or the miner's frontier, and the farmer's frontier."

Frederick Jackson Turner.

Lee County, where Virginia begins.

[♪♪♪] I've heard it said, "Where we are affects who we are."

And I think we have the chance to understand ourselves better if we understand where we come from.

Hi, my name's Josh, and I'm producing this series with PBS Appalachia to explore the towns that so many people still call home, their hometown, to unearth remarkable stories and the people behind them.

Hometowns is about exploring the communities that make small-town America unique.

This season, I'll take you on a journey off the beaten path through Southwest Virginia.

And don't get me wrong, this place has its warts, but if that's all I showed you, you'd miss out on the remarkable beauty of its natural wonders, and the rich depth of its cultural heritage that, in a sense, are at the heart of what it means to be an American.

[♪♪♪] Lee County is the southwesternmost county in the Commonwealth of Virginia, bordered on the south by Tennessee, and on the north and west by Kentucky.

To locals, the county is divided into two distinct halves: the lower end, to the west, with its scenic rolling pastures, towering rock faces, and even Indian burial mounds; [♪♪♪] and the upper end, with its towns and centers of commerce, and at one time, coal production.

Like so many counties in the coal region of Appalachia, Lee County saw its share of boom times as a coal-producing county.

Communities here like St. Charles and Keokee are all but a memory of yesteryear during the height of coal extraction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

[♪♪♪] [Bryan Hogan] Lee County, you know, decades ago, was a coal community, undoubtedly.

And coal drove everything.

In fact, our population was bigger.

The towns had more folks in them than they do now.

So when coal left our area, you know, it really hurt the community.

And not too long after that, we saw a decline in tobacco.

And tobacco was truly a cash crop for the folks here.

It really hurt us in a lot of ways, as a community, as a county.

But what we're seeing now is a resurgence.

And there's even some initiatives and some projects to bring back farming, particularly small grains, specifically for breweries and distilleries.

And for all of Southwest Virginia, as a matter of fact.

[Joshua Deel] The largest town in Lee County is Pennington Gap.

A mountain pass named for an early settler, the town came into existence with the extension of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad in the late 1800s.

Acting as a shortcut highway to Eastern Kentucky, it served as a hub for the extensive coal mining region.

Pennington Gap is also home to the Lee Theater.

Originally built in 1946 and now completely restored, the Lee serves as an entertainment hub in town.

During the turn of the last century, one-room schoolhouses were prevalent throughout rural Appalachia.

And one such schoolhouse here in Pennington Gap once served as the only primary school for Black students in Lee County, and today is the Appalachian African American Cultural Center, an organization dedicated to documenting and preserving Black history throughout the region.

[♪♪♪] Preserving Appalachian heritage and traditions is a tangible thing in Lee County.

Old Virginia Hand Hewn Log Homes is a consummate example of keeping the past alive, with exemplary attention to detail and craft for more than 40 years.

It's how the Williams family built their legacy, which Bryan and his wife have expanded into a modern distillery producing Appalachian whiskeys.

-Well, you know, I think to get the backstory of the distillery, we have to look a little bit at the backstory of Old Virginia.

Old Virginia Hand Hewn Log Homes, it was a company started by my wife Heather's grandmother, who was Judy Williams, 42 years ago.

And she's still here, she's still the boss.

Heather and I came down about 20 years to help out with that, and in that time, we always knew we needed to expand the business.

And just like the log homes where we build our log homes all over the country, we wanted to do a business that would provide a value to the local community, but also be able to export a little bit of Lee County out of here as well.

And right now, we're currently all over Virginia, we hope to expand in other states soon.

So, on our logo, we've got a little picture of Virginia, and it has a star right where Lee County is.

And it kind of makes you feel good to go into a store a ways away from here and know that there's a piece of Lee County that's making its way around the world.

You know, from a bourbon standpoint, I get a lot about "Kentucky's the only place to make bourbon," and I just have to remind them that Virginia was making whiskey before Kentucky was a state, so... We love to make the whiskey here, and I'm excited to think that we are working towards having a product that's not only 100 percent made here when we make our bourbon, and some of the grains do come from here now, but I'm excited for the day when we have an absolute 100 percent Southwest Virginia, or really slightly broader, Appalachian product.

And that'll be a good day, because it says our communities are working to go-- oddly enough, we're going to move into the future by looking at something we did in the past.

To me, Lee County is Appalachia, and Appalachia's a people.

It's how we talk, it's our mannerisms, it's-- to put it in a better perspective, it's being broken down on the side of the road, and it won't be five minutes before somebody's going to stop and help you.

A lot of people like to imagine the Appalachian folks as being sort of this hillbilly caricature, and that's not true at all.

You know, it's a people who, because of the geography, because of the location in the country, because of the economic situation, we have, out of necessity, become a people who are resourceful, and who are careful and mindful about what we do.

When you put up your hay, you make sure you can put up your hay, and you do it right.

When we make log homes, we do it to the absolute best that we possibly can.

And you see that all around.

I mean, you know, somebody may not have a lot of money, and they may have an older truck, but they're going to take care of that truck because they depend on it.

And that's something I think that gets glossed over a lot.

Appalachian people are an intelligent people.

They may have an accent that's different than someone else's.

It may be played up in the movies, but that's not fair at all.

I think that we are not just a resourceful people, Appalachian people are exceptional people.

And I love it here, and I've been around the world, quite honestly, and I always end up coming back home.

[Joshua Deel] Lee County gets its name from Revolutionary War hero Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee, father of Robert E. Lee.

The county seat is the town of Jonesville.

It was once home to the founder of osteopathic medicine, Dr. Andrew Taylor Still.

[♪♪♪] In January of 1864, Jonesville saw Southwest Virginia's largest battle, the Battle of Jonesville, during the War Between the States.

As Southern forces moved to take Cumberland Gap from Northern troops, they encountered a Union force encamped around Jonesville, which ultimately led to Southern victory and Lee County remaining in Southern hands through the rest of the war.

Although the battlefield has not been preserved, Lee County's only monument is a memorial to unknown Confederate soldiers who died in the battle.

As Bryan mentioned, the people of Appalachia are resourceful, and the mountains here are filled with music, music that is played on instruments often crafted by hand, right here in the hollers and hills.

[Jay Gilliam] As far as what drives me, I just love it.

I love spending time in the shop, and I love making music.

That's what I was born to do.

[soulful guitar chords] I'm Jay Gilliam, and I'm here in Ocoonita, Virginia, near Jonesville, in just another one of the many hollers here.

Ocoonita's actually an Indian word.

We joke back and forth, we had a telemarketer, asked how it was said or something, and she said "Oh-cun-i-tah."

And I said, "Well, that sounds Cherokee."

So we looked it up, and it's actually an Indian word, which means "little game."

Apparently, at some point, there wasn't much huntin' up here, but at this point, there's more deers and skunks than there are people.

[lively guitar chords] I make guitars and different instruments out of cigar boxes and license plates and cookie tins and just all sorts of different things.

I've had a waiting list on them for about 15 years now, and I've probably built 2,500.

I started out building my own instruments.

I had played guitar since I was 16, and mandolin and banjo and piano and pretty much everything.

And I wanted to play somethin' different, so I bought a dulcimer, which most people know you play in your lap.

And I couldn't get used to that, and I tried to hold it like a guitar, and the body's so big that wouldn't work.

So I thought if I could build a dulcimer that I could hold like a guitar, then I would be happy.

So what I did, I stumbled on cigar box guitars, and most of those are just no frets and three strings, which a dulcimer has three strings.

So, I decided to build a dulcimer from a cigar box, and I could play it like a guitar.

This particular one that I actually made from a license plate, and I made the box just from a piece of poplar and some plywood.

And the next, a piece of oak.

All sorts of different boxes, and I made my own boxes, made solid bodies.

I've seen guitars made out of shovels, I've never made one.

I've seen them made out of deer skulls, although I've not made one yet.

But they say they sound pretty good.

[country music guitar chords] Most of my customers are just everyday people who don't really have, or don't feel they have a lot of musical talent.

And a simple instrument that maybe costs $100 is a lot more reasonable for them just to beat around on and make some music at home.

I actually have a lot of custom work for people who are professional musicians.

People busk, you know, they sit out on the street with these, with battery-powered homemade amps like this.

And some even make a living like that.

And there's a lot of famous people who have really lent a lot of popularity to cigar box guitars in the last little bit.

[Joshua Deel] Not only did I get the chance to experience firsthand how instruments like the cigar box guitar have historically been made by the sheer resourcefulness of Appalachians, using whatever materials they had access to, but Jay told me about a place nearby that also stands as a testament to the determination of people calling these mountains home, a place called Hensley Settlement.

[Brittony Pique] So today we are at Hensley Settlement , which is located on top of Brush Mountain.

It is an early 1900s Appalachian homestead here on top of the mountain where there's, surprisingly enough, a lot of flat land.

But very peaceful, very serene.

And this settlement lasted until about 1951.

So the settlement is located kind of the happy medium, a little bit of Kentucky, a little bit of Lee County, Virginia.

And most of the people, when they were living up here, would travel down the Chadwell Gap Trail or Chadwell Gap to Lee County, Virginia to do any of their barter and trading, visit with family that may have already moved off the mountain or was living off the mountain, go into Cumberland Gap trade days, whatever the case may have been.

But they definitely visited Lee County quite a bit.

Lee County was a big part of their movement through the mountain.

There's a stream that runs all the way around the settlement.

Being able to make and run moonshine, that was one of their big trade items at the time.

Big reason a lot of them moved off the mountain, they were going off the mountain for work because even though trade was a big, still a big part of their lives at the time, there was still means that they had to make a little bit of money.

And so they were going off for work, finding spouses to marry.

They were finding all these new modern things.

It was easier, a little bit easier in an aspect.

They didn't have to make the trek all the way back up the mountain, whatever the case may have been.

And once one family started moving off, they all started moving off.

And that togetherness kind of still stuck.

A lot of that family today is still either in Harlan County, Kentucky or Lee County, Virginia.

So the roots are still strong.

[♪♪♪] -So we made it here to the Cumberland Gap.

We're at the Pinnacle Overlook right now, which is overlooking three different states.

We've got Cumberland Gap, Tennessee right over the cliff here.

In the distance, we've got Kentucky.

And then we just came through Virginia, which ends right here at the Gap.

I couldn't visit the Pinnacle Overlook and not explore Gap Cave, literally just beneath it.

And did I mention, the cave has incredible acoustics.

[Rachel Teeter] ♪ The holly and the ivy ♪ ♪ When they are both Full grown ♪ ♪ Of all the other trees That are in the wood ♪ ♪ The holly bears the crown ♪ ♪ Or the rising of the sun ♪ ♪ And the running of the deer ♪ ♪ The playing Of the merry organ ♪ ♪ Sweet singing in the choir ♪ It's likely that Native Americans did come in here.

We do have some evidence that they were coming in here and to light their way through the cave, they would tie river cane together and light the top on fire.

Whenever that river cane would burn down a little bit, they'd punch it up against the wall or the ceiling to get the fire going again.

And we do have some torch marks throughout the cave.

The first documented European-American person to come through the Cumberland Gap was Dr. Thomas Walker.

And he wrote about how he came past Gap Cave because he was watering his horse by a creek and he felt the air coming out of the entrance.

He was the original person to name Gap Cave.

He also named the Cumberland River after the Duke of Cumberland.

Of course, if you ask any of the Scots folk who settled this area afterwards, they'd probably have a very different opinion on the Duke of Cumberland.

[Joshua Deel] The cave changed ownership a number of times before being taken over by the National Park Service.

One name I've always heard it called is Cudjo's Cave.

[Rachel Teeter] Cudjo's Cave is based on a book written by J.T.

Trowbridge during the Civil War.

He was an abolitionist, so he wrote a book about an escaped African slave who ran around Eastern Tennessee having all sorts of adventures with a Quaker teacher who was dodging the draft.

They eventually go into a cave and have even more adventures, and that cave does exist.

It is apparently in Friendsville, Tennessee, but it's not our cave.

The people who own this cave just wanted to capitalize on the popularity of the book.

It was about on par with how Harry Potter is today.

If you said "Cudjo's Cave" in the late 1800s, early 1900s, everyone knew what you were talking about.

[Joshua Deel] It's easy to see how folklore and legends like Cudjo form and take hold over time.

Another area folk hero, and one of the largest at that, was a moonshining matron known as Big Haley.

[DruAnna Overbay] Her home sat up there right where it comes down into like a crest, not a crest, but a V. We would sit over here on this front porch and could look up when the leaves were off the trees and we could see Aunt Mahalia's house.

-Really?

-Yeah.

-What would this be referred to as?

-This is Newman's Ridge.

[Joshua Deel] Newman's Ridge?

[DruAnna Overbay] You've got Blackwater Creek, and on the other side of Blackwater Creek is Newman's Ridge.

The product that she had that people wanted the most was her apple brandy and pear brandy.

It has been argued that she didn't make it, that she only sold it, and that her son and husband were the ones who made it.

And then they'd bring it into the house and she would sell it.

But, somewhere back earlier, and it may be in the Presbyterian archives, I saw a picture of her sitting on her bed and a moonshine still right in front of her.

So now, did she make it?

Did she assist in making it?

Or was she only the seller?

I don't know.

[Joshua Deel] Why was she such a legend?

[DruAnna Overbay] One of the reasons is because it was highly unusual for a woman to be in this business.

[Joshua Deel] Hm-mm.

[DruAnna Overbay] And the other reason is because of her size.

And I think her size has been exaggerated over the years.

She keeps getting heavier and heavier and heavier, and I think, "My gosh."

But I think that she probably was about between 300 and 400 pounds, which would have made it hard for anyone to try to pick her up and arrest her.

The story is that she was much too large to get out her door.

And she may have been so large that they couldn't get her out her door.

But she wasn't going to do anything to assist them.

She wasn't going to turn sideways to go out, for sure.

One of the reasons they wanted to arrest her, and I don't know if people know this is true or not true, but I learned from one of my older relatives that during the time that she was making moonshine, it was not illegal.

What was illegal was not to pay the taxes on it.

And she refused to pay the taxes because her father, Solomon Collins, had applied to become recognized as an Indian so that he could get some of the reparation money that the government was putting out.

At that time, and I don't know if this is true or not true, at that time, the government was asking for a fee, application fee.

Solomon Collins sent in his application fee and they said, "You're not an Indian.

You don't have an Indian name."

They kept his money, denied him being an Indian.

So she said, "They're not getting a damn dime of my money.

They owe me money with interest from what they took from my father."

See, she was a smart businesswoman.

[Joshua Deel] She was a businesswoman, yeah.

[DruAnna Overbay] She knew exactly what she was doing.

Very intelligent.

[Joshua Deel] So this would have been pre-Prohibition, certainly, right?

[DruAnna Overbay] Well, maybe.

Maybe right in that time frame.

[Joshua Deel] Okay, okay.

[DruAnna Overbay] This was the sheriff who came to arrest her, and his name was George Washington Edds.

Even though it's spelled E-D-D-S, it's pronounced "Eeds."

And the story, the little poem that his grandson wrote about it was, "Big Haley, her name was "Mahalia Collins Mullins, they said.

"The last years of her life Were spent on her bed.

"Throughout the whole valley And parts all around, "No heavier lady There ever was found.

"So heavy she couldn't Walk over the floor.

"And she was far broader Than her entrance door.

"The lawmen ignored her, Yet everyone knew, "Her business was dealing In illicit brew.

"Indicted quite often, But never brought out, "The doors were too small For a lady so stout.

"They said Judge Tyler Was looking for fun, "He'd needle the sheriff With his special pun.

"He'd wink at Sheriff Edds, Then ask with a smile, "'Now just when are you Bringing her in for a trial?'

"Now there was rumors, Some vowed it was true, "Judge Tyler would often Partake of her brew.

"They took out the fireplace When Mahalia died, "The most logical way To bring her outside.

"I'm ending this story, There isn't any more, For she passed away At the age of 74."

[gentle guitar chords] [Joshua Deel] The struggle is as old as the mountains.

The progression of civilization.

How to make it in the wilderness.

These hills in rural Appalachia.

Themes like this are played out across small-town America and often given voice in the anthems born from the soul of musicians who call these mountains home.

-♪ Many nights I've stumbled ♪ ♪ Many nights fell through ♪ ♪ No one can even see all the Hell that I've been through ♪ ♪ They cast a rock Like a heavy stone ♪ ♪ They leave you burdened And all alone ♪ ♪ Even like the morning Can't be found ♪ ♪ There's not a lot to choose ♪ ♪ Between the devils In this town ♪ [upbeat guitar chords] ♪ I've been as far As I can see ♪ ♪ I've seen the lights In Tennessee ♪ ♪ Every time I leave It takes another piece of me ♪ ♪ I've watched the walls Come falling down ♪ ♪ And on their way Back to the ground ♪ ♪ There's not a lot to choose ♪ ♪ Between the devils In this town ♪ ♪ Like devils in this town ♪ [gentle guitar chords] ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Sometimes feeling broken Just forgetting how to live ♪ ♪ Seems like I have taken So much more than I can give ♪ ♪ I've had the storms Cast me around ♪ ♪ And lost this war Without a sound ♪ ♪ There's not a lot to choose ♪ ♪ Between the devils In this town ♪ ♪ Like devils in this town ♪ [perky guitar chords] ♪ Like devils in this town ♪ ♪ Like devils in this town ♪ [upbeat guitar chords] ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ [music fades out] Nestled in the heart of Appalachia.

The University of Virginia's College at Wise is where students experience unique regional culture and the great outdoors.

UVA Wise empowering students to learn and lead in their communities and the world.